HOW TO PREVENT THE #1 LOSE OF YOUR INCOME IN B2B SALES & SELLING

Hey, before we get into the interview, I want to make sure you're aware of our other podcasts, the Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers Show, which is a very quick, under 5 minutes in most cases, sometimes just a few minutes where I answer your questions. You can just send me any question to my LinkedIn profile, Brian G. Burns, and I'll put it in the queue to answer. Also, the Sales Leadership Show. If you're looking to get into sales leadership or you want to hear from the world's best sales leaders, that's where I interview them. Check it out, the Sales Leadership Show. Also at b2brevenue.com, you can learn all about all the courses. Links are in the show notes below, as well as our link to our partners over at brevitypitch.com, the fastest, easiest way to become great at sales and practice.

Before it's showtime. Here we go. Now, a lot of people think that in the complex sale, a deal stalling is some unusual thing. Have you seen that most of them just skate right through?

I read this quote recently and I can't remember who said it, but it said, birds fly, fish swim, and deals fall through. So I think it does happen pretty often. And it always seems that the ones you're the most confident in For whatever reason, as a salesperson, are the ones that don't happen. So yes, for sure. I think if the more complex the deal is, the more likely that something's going to happen to stall it or push it to next quarter or shrink it in size somehow. And that's where a lot of pain and stress comes from sales individuals as well as the leadership. So I guess the question is, why, why is that happening? I think there's a lot of reasons it does happen, but Most of it is probably preventable in some form or fashion if you really think through these complex sales cycles. But with the way society is these days, we're just constantly reacting to everything. We're running around meeting to meeting and we don't take the time to look back at why are things stalling, why are things getting pushed to next quarter, etc. But it's been a big focus for me the last couple of years, just trying to figure out why those deals get stuck.

Yeah. And early I kind of learned that that's the natural thing to have. It's not the exception, it's the natural thing. And I went from selling, you know, big expensive stuff to less expensive stuff and doing, trying to do more of these deals. But you'd always fall into the traps. And I think it happens because we talk to our champion and our champion's telling us, oh yeah, I need it, want it. Obviously they can afford it. So what's, what's the problem?

Let's get it done.

Sign it off. What people don't realize is no one cares what the champion thinks. They're a user buyer with zero budget authority, no political understanding, and they think the world revolves around them. What could go wrong?

Yeah.

So they don't know how to get anything done internally. They assume that their wish is someone else's command. And they don't tell the rep what's going on, and the rep just assumes it's gonna happen. And they get the update, oh, it's in procurement, and they don't ask any questions. And what I was doing with my reps is, next time you say it's in procurement, tell me the procurement officer's name and number. And all of a sudden, there weren't many things that procurement did.

Champ. Yeah. Dealing with one person or the champion and relying too much on that person is probably one of the more common ones. Definitely either they, they're overconfident. So that person you're working with thinks that they can get stuff done at that particular company, but have they really done that before? Do they have experience? But as a salesperson, you typically just believe Everything they're saying, you get those happy ears, and it sounds great, and and you think it's just going to move forward to that next stage. So part of it is probably the happy ears that you get as a salesperson and believing what the customer is telling you. But as I know you've mentioned many times in the past, most folks don't understand how decisions get made at their companies, no matter high up their their title is, and and it's something that we just underestimate every single time. So but it's painful. I mean, when when those deals get stuck. And then you have to report back to your company and let them know what happened in the pipeline, and it causes a chain reaction that's not fun for anybody. So another thing that has really helped me is trying to prioritize my deals in my pipeline based off which ones I should spend the most time on, because I used to spend a lot of time on a lot of different deals, and it was not very effective for the deals getting stuck. So when I actually looked at what are the deals that are most likely to succeed and focus on those, I had a lot less deals getting stalled. But when I was treating everything the same and working on all these opportunities, a lot more things were getting stuck because I was just focused on too many different things. So prioritizing is a big one too in an individual deal and also just the pipeline overall.

Yeah, I mean, that'll help, but you still have to know How to get the deal done and not listen to the client. The client doesn't know how to get a deal done. So what do people do? They service them. They don't sell the deal. And what I mean by service them, they go, oh, you need another proposal, another discount, anything else, an extended eval. That's service. That's not selling. And you got— if you have, you have to accept that it's more likely to stall, 4 times more likely to stall than just go through. And what we're talking about is a new account. This is not upselling or cross-selling. That's much easier. There's paperwork already in place. They already know the process. Much easier getting into a new account.

Who knows?

And I've sat down with CEOs that don't know how to get it done. So everyone asks, you know, who's the decision maker? And everyone says they are. I did a post last week on procurement. I'll never give procurement a discount. And I had a good 5 procurement managers rail on me, telling, telling me that they're the go-to, go or no-go decision maker in their company. And I replied back, I go, how long has the CEO been reporting to you? Well, you know, go or no-go when the paper gets issued. Yeah, we all know that. So if the CEO calls you and says you've got 1 hour to get it out, how long does it take to get out? Less than an hour.

Point.

Okay.

You're the decision maker, right? Everyone thinks they're the decision maker. Quit asking that question. What decision? That champion's making the decision to meet with you, maybe to pick the product, maybe the configuration and the quantity. Price?

No.

When?

No.

Who? Capital budget? OpEx budget?

No.

Purchase request sign-off?

No.

There's a lot of decisions to be left. If you don't understand what those are to begin with, How would you know where it is? You would obviously believe what you're told. And this is— nobody teaches this anymore because everyone thinks they can make up for it in numbers. Get more people who can't get it done. And you'd have to have a lot. You have to have 4 times as much pipeline to do that. And the people who tend to get some get it done are going to be small, tiny deals and small, insignificant companies. Not the ones you want. You want the big brands, you know, the big deals. And the bigger the company, that means the more people have to sign off on it who all think they're the decision maker.

Great points there. And, and it's, it's a big distinction when you're going after new business, new logos, whatever you want to call it. It's much more challenging than growing existing accounts. And there's a lot more pain to get things done. And then just really not understanding how the companies make decisions and all the different levels that I think it's shocking how when you get over a certain threshold, how much people will touch things, but salespeople just tend to not think about that. And then they talk more about their company, the features, benefits, everything that's going on. But I found also too that A lot of times it wasn't even that they went with the competitor. So I'm competing with just them doing nothing or status quo. So a lot of times you're trying to get people to change and that change management is so painful to do something different from what they were doing before. So it's not even that I'm competing against a competitor or an incumbent sometimes for sure, but it's, it's just that, that actual change and that status quo. People want to do things that are easy for them that make them feel better. They don't want to do stuff that's disruptive and change. So really getting into the kind of psychology of, of what are you disrupting for these different business units that you're talking to? And it can get pretty in-depth to think through that. But I, I think a lot of people miss that part of it too, is how are you actually affecting those individuals or that business unit? Because if you're making them change and you don't have your story together of how it's going to help that end result, it's definitely going to get stalled at some point. So you have to figure out who those people are that may be the naysayers or what have you and figure out how to get them on your side somehow. But that gets lost in the shuffle as well. You just assume because everything you're being told internally about how great your company is, how great the product is, that you forget how it's actually impacting the customer or the end user. So that I've seen that, that's happened to me many times where I underestimated that when I was in healthcare and the power of all these nurses combined. If I was not making their life better or making a change for them, they them together would, would make a big difference in, in getting something done. So it's interesting from that perspective as well.

Yeah, because, you know, when we say stall, people are like, well, my deals don't get stalled. We mean any reason why it doesn't close when you expect it to close. So yeah, it might close 6 to 9 months later, which will probably more likely happen, but now you're spending 2 to 3 times the energy on it. Which means you could have closed 2 or 3 times more deals. That's lost income to you. And that time is needed because you don't know how to get it done and they don't know how to get it done. And change is a big reason. Everyone thinks it's politics or budget. The one thing it's almost never is money. And everybody thinks it's money because that's what happens in the simple sale. What's preventing you from buying a new car? It might be money. It might be the change in your life. You got to change insurance, car registration, parking. Do you trade your car in? Do you sell it? Do you keep it? It changes your lifestyle, your workflow. Do you drive it to work? Where do you park it at work? Do you want everybody at work to see you in a new car? How does that affect you positively, negatively? There's a lot of Things. Now you go to a company and that person wants it, needs it, and it makes perfect business sense, logical sense, but they have to sell it internally and they've probably never done that before. No one teaches that. No one wants that to happen. And that is an unnatural act, meaning that if it was a natural act, everyone would know how to do it. And it would naturally flow like their time cards and their CRM updates and all the other bullshit that naturally flows. But most departments, you know, even IT departments that do buy a lot of stuff, you know, they've got schedules and prioritization and preferences all over the place. And what people don't understand is, you know, even a tiny, I say tiny, 6-figure deal. And I remember doing this at, you know, the Google at the time. We were replacing their whole database and I was trying to get just a dev license package through by the end of the quarter, sitting down with a co-founder of this company, you know, who Eventually became a billionaire for a short period of time. And it was a little over $100K. And he was like, can you get this under $100K? Otherwise, it has to go to the board. And I'm like, okay.

Right.

I go, what does that mean? He goes, that means it's going to take a whole lot of time, you know, and I could be in the hospital and this thing could save my life. It would still take a lot of time to get approved. So you have to understand that, that here is this guy, he wants it, he needs it, his team is begging for it, but he can't get it done. You know, because now he's got to go to the CEO, he's got to call the board, and, and a lot of companies are set up like this.

So at the very least, that would add a ton of time. And then when you started going into the board situation, who knows what Those folks' preferences could be, it could be a competitor of yours and then it could derail everything. So that, that's shocking even for $100K with that. So I, I've also found, I know I've made this mistake many times, is that I will try to go too fast throughout the process and I'll skip steps because either that's what the customer's saying to skip steps and I believe them, or I want that big deal, the bigger opportunity. Versus getting in the door. Because to that example right there, you could get in the door for less than $100K, and who knows what that could lead to later. I'm sure there's all kinds of things you can upsell and land and expand, which is way easier than finding a new business. But I've tried to go too big and go over that threshold you just talked about, which caused a lot more people involved, a lot more committees about a committee to get ready for that. And it messed up deals completely when I tried to go too big. So it It's partly on me and then it's partly on me for listening to the customer and believing because they get excited. They, they like the product. They like what you're talking about. You're, you're good at your job. So you're convinced, convincing them and they're drinking the Kool-Aid, but then they want to go big too. And then that usually backfires, especially for larger organizations. If you're talking Fortune 500 or enterprise situations, going big too fast rarely works very well unless if it's a, emergency situation during COVID or different things that happened over the past few decades. So I have to take a step back a lot and, and just start small and realize if I can get in the door, that in itself is somewhat of a lockout with a variety of things. And then you can keep building from there and it's way easier to land and expand than it is to find new business.

Yeah, because I fell in the trap myself and I teach people how not to fall in the trap. I had a listener of the podcast, longtime listener, you know, a guy who's in sales good 25, 30 years. He's at this startup because we want to sponsor the podcast for one quarter. We have no leads. It was a good match. They were well funded. Um, Tim Cook was on the board.

Wow.

Right? A credible company because it's already approved. Just send me a quote. And I'm like, well, he's in sales. Why am I not talking to the marketing people? I go, how about the CMO? Is he on board? Oh, he definitely wants this. Like, why isn't he on the call then? You know, don't worry about it. I got this. You know, you're overcomplicating it. Okay, here goes the quote. You know, 20 minutes later, I get an email from You know, the lady who was on the phone, I don't forget she was in marketing. She never said a word during the call. Oh, Brian, thank you for your effort. Unfortunately, we're gonna have to delay this at least a quarter. And I'm like, you knew what happened, right? Nobody above them really knew about it. They went, they went to really get the funding. And somebody says, what are we, what are you doing? You're in sales. You're not in marketing. And it just dies. So usually the faster you anticipate or being told that it's going to happen is the faster it'll die and the easier they'll give up because they're disappointed themselves and they look bad. So let's now talk about, you know, how do you prevent this? First, you have to understand how companies buy. What is the technical decision process and the business decision process? And if you don't know, you better find out. Otherwise, you're going to be finding out by trial and error. And don't talk about economics with somebody who has no economic approval, because everyone is going to ask for a discount. Everyone asks the price. It's the easiest question in the world to come up with. Get that champion on board with the product so they know they must have it and they know how to articulate it. Work with them to go through this journey with them. Don't go sending them a proposal because where do the deals die? Everything's all fun and games until they try and get it done internally. All those first calls are fantastic. They always go well. The demo, the presentation's magical. The eval usually goes pretty good, or there's some friction, but then you want it this quarter, whatever quarter that is, and they were thinking probably 6 months from now. Who knows what they were thinking? Because they can play with it forever for free if you let them to. So you're gonna go for the close, and are your ducks in a row? Does leadership know about this?

Do they care?

Do they understand what the problem is and how it impacts them personally? And everybody— well, our product is the best. No one cares. People above the end user of it probably don't even know what it does. You know, even if it's a payroll system, well, we do payroll now. We've been doing it since the company started. Why do we need to switch? Right? And you get like a high friction, uh, switching cost like that where it affects everybody in the company. Everybody wants their pay and they want their pay right or better than right. They don't want it less than right.

Definitely.

So guess what? How fast is that going to happen? And the faster you push, More likely you are to kill the deal than you are to create the deal. And everybody thinks time kills all deals. Well, you can move too fast too.

It's happened to me many times and it's, it can be, it's tough when you have that example that you just stated where the customer wants to go big and it's just, it's hard to break through that sometimes. But I think if you can let them know, And then you can understand if they're actually serious is like, hey, if we if we go this way, there's a lot of risks that it's probably going to backfire. So if you let them know that and you talk through that, you can get it. That's a good acid test of if they really are serious. If they believe you and trust you, then you're like, hey, we got to take a step back. So that's that's where I need to catch myself and actually do that practice what I preach on that comment there. But it's yeah, it is a prevention game, and I it's it's going to be painful either way. So would you rather have the pain of doing the upfront work or the pain of losing the deal and losing money? Money out of your pocket. I would rather do the upfront work. I'm a little more analytical, so it's probably easier for me to do that, and I probably do too much, but that helps me be confident when I'm going through the process. It's not always going to work out. Nothing ever does. But if you have a kind of map of where you want to go and where things stall in the past based off your particular use case, it makes things way more seamless. It builds your confidence because you're not just winging it going into these deals. You actually know where this is typically going to get slowed up and what's going to happen. So you don't take stuff as personally because you already kind of know how long— hey, this is a 6-month deal cycle, so you can't expect stuff to happen in 2 months. I think that happens a ton is where you have all this pressure internally to close stuff in the quarter. If you know the deal's going to take 6 or 12 months and you're only a few months in, You can't expect to expedite that. You're— it's gonna backfire. So there's a lot of things behind that. But I— but to your point earlier about the numbers game, I think that has kind of threw a wrench in it because, because, because the salespeople may want to do that, but then they get so much pressure to hit the numbers or they're behind. It's the end of the, end of the quarter. And then they start doing unnatural things that they normally wouldn't do and it blows up these deals. So it's— Not, not easy to manage all that, but if you don't do the work on the front end, you're gonna keep falling into those same traps most likely.

Right. And I fell into that trap because here I have this guy who's telling me it's all set, it's all approved. But what he's telling me didn't match up with the actions. Why wasn't the CMO on the call? And I asked him, he goes, oh, he was busy. I'm like, okay. And it still didn't feel right, me sending the quote over, but I'm like, How much time am I gonna spend on this? And, you know, but I've seen it in the course quite a bit. If a deal is happening faster than it usually does, or it's bigger than normal ones, and your champion starts selling you, who's the customer? They're getting paid. We're not getting paid. We're the ones at risk. They don't care. And they don't care if you get the deal or not either. No customer ever asks, how much are you making on this deal? They don't care. It's up to us. Half or two— a third of our income is in our commission, which is really our time. And people are spending way too much time on deals that Are not going to close, but could close. That's the difference. Now, in this deal, in mine, I should have just held back. I should— let's, let's get the CMO on board. I want to hear his feedback. Someone other than you, who's the benefit— the beneficiary of this, but I don't know how much control he has in the company. He could be Mr. Big Cheese, or he could just be a new, you know, Goomba hanging out. I don't know. But it's a trap, right? You know, anything that's easy to walk into, you can't get out of, and you're in it. And I bet a lot of people, you know, when they hear send me a proposal, they light up. Are you ready for that? Do you have the technical sale? Have they excluded all the other alternatives? What happens if they do nothing? What does management think about this? Have you talked to anyone other than this one person? Because usually if that person's so excited about it, there's a big personal win in it for them that may not be there for other people. So no one else is probably as excited. And it's a lot of money. And you're relying on them to articulate what they get for it compared to the alternatives.

Because very rarely are you able to attend those internal meetings where your champion is pitching it or trying to convince other people. I wish You know, you know, you're doing a good job if you are able to attend those meetings where you know that they actually do want this to be successful. But that, that's the exception. That's not the normal. Usually it's them presenting it. You have no idea what they're gonna say if they had a bad day or they're stressed out. How are they gonna articulate it? And they really just need to be able to say 2 or 3 things of how it's gonna transform the company or add value, etc. But easier said than done. And, and we don't think about what that person has to go through when we're not around. And even us articulating that can be tough as well, let alone the champion. Because to your point earlier, that C-suite, they have no idea. They have 50 things on their desk of things that are supposed to get approved. So they don't know the difference between widget A and widget B, nor do they probably really care. So if you can't get them equipped to do that, there's, there's a lot of risk there with, with that proposal phase. But once you do, make those mistakes, as you've said before, it's, it's not impossible to recover, but it's going to be painful. It's going to suck the energy out of you, and you're going to be probably fed up with sales at some point if you keep recovering from all those mistakes, and, and versus just preventing it on the front end. So it's both are hard, as I mentioned before, but yeah, choose your heart a little bit. And I'd rather choose the one where I'm more prepared, and at least I know close to the pin of what that outcome could, could be. But We also have a ton of ego in sales. We have a lot of overconfidence. So we, we think we can get stuff done even if it's not winnable opportunities sometimes, which puts us in a rabbit hole as well because we're very confident people and we should be. But we also are confident on every deal that we work on that we can make it happen. And that's not usually the case.

Yeah. And when I used to talk to the people interested in getting into the course, I now have someone else who does it. I'd always ask, where do your deals get stalled? Almost no one could answer me, which means either they probably don't want to know, because if they, if they knew, they'd have to do something. It's better just to say no budgets, politics, status quo, you know, these kind of blanket things that really don't describe where it is and what caused it to stall. You have to become a student of the game of where the stall happens and why to prevent it. Otherwise, you're servicing the deal, not selling it. And if you're servicing, what value are you bringing?

And to become great at sales, the best way is to model somebody who already Has become good at sales and to hear other people who have become great at sales and the journey that they're going through, the false beliefs, the misnomers, the mindset issues, all of the stuff that gets in our way between where we are and the income that we want. Let's face it, we're in sales because we're money motivated, we're competitive, We want to be better every day than we were yesterday. And how do we do that? Hmm, just really, you know, read a book, listen to a podcast. That's good. Good start. I like it. But then you have to take action. And then you want both tactical and strategic ideas. You want mindset. You want strategy. You want to understand how companies buy. You want really deep content and examples, case studies, so that you can learn from other people's mistakes.

That's what I'm here for.

I'm here for you to learn from my mistakes. And boy, do I got a lot of them. So go to b2brevenue.com, sign up for the courses. There's 2 major ones. Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting fills up your pipeline. Gets rid of that problem of, oh, I don't have enough leads. I don't have enough meetings. It gets those conversations started with the people you want to talk to. Now, it's not about a pitch. It's about a conversation. Now, everybody thinks of conversations when you're talking or you're online at the same time, or you're on the phone or Zoom at the same time. That's not a conversation. A conversation is when the client is talking about what they care about. What they're interested in. And that is what we call qualification, where we can sense where are they and how do we build up that curiosity into interest into urgency to get a deal. And these are skills that we need. They're lifelong skills that we need in sales. And then how do we get a deal closed? Yes, anyone can take an order. But what if they don't know how to get it done? You get a new account where you're trying to get a big change done internally. What are the issues? If you're not planning that through, odds are it's not going to get done no matter how much your champion wants it. So winning the complex sale solves that problem for you. Why waste all your time on these false positives or these no decisions? Because they don't pay very well. They pay 0.0. What you want to do is pay a lot. So sign up today. Invest in yourself. You're the asset in sales. Quit waiting for somebody else to approve it or train you. See if you can get it expensed. That should be your first sales obstacle. Your first sales challenge is how do you get your company to pay for it? Just go down, tell your manager you want to do this. I put a little example email in the show notes right below here. Just swipe up and take a look at that. And if they won't, you got to ask yourself, why won't you? Why won't you? Oh, it takes time. Well, you work all day. You're working wrong all day. Why not improve that? There's the time right there. Oh, the money, Brian. It's money. Well, you make more money if you become better in sales. And Start the Conversation pays for itself the first week because you're going to get at least 2 meetings just learning from the very basics of it. Closing the Complex Sale will pay for itself 100 times over. Students in it tell me it's the best money they ever spent because they now have control over their deals. And it doesn't end. Some give up. Some give up after they win their first deal and they think they've got enough. No, come back, come back, keep going. You can get even bigger deals, more deals, faster deals. That's what it's all about. Sign up today. Put the excuses away.

Yeah.

Excuses feel good, but they're expensive. Excuse— you know what the excuses are costing you? Tens, 50, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in lost income. Really?

Yeah.

The difference between where you are today— let's say you're making $150,000, decent, decent income, but you know there's other people in your industry making $300,000, $400,000, $500,000. Well, how are you going to do that? You all think it's just about getting a better job, a better territory, a better manager. They can help. Go do that. Then what happens? It's still you there with those leads trying to close those deals. And do you have the game? Few people do. Everyone thinks they do. Why not prove it? The market tells you what you're worth.

Accept it.

Now become better. And the way to become better is to improve every day. Really make a daily routine of learning and developing because it's not at the knowledge level. You have to become unconsciously competent at these skills, which takes Time, repetition, and emotion. And I show you how to do it, how I did it, how I've taught hundreds of people to do it. But you have to want to because I can't force you. A lot of people wish I could. So do I, but I can't.

So sign up today. We'll see you next time.